Thursday, January 7, 2016

Long term trends

What will human life be like fifty years from now?

Here are some of my ideas (in no particular order):

Increasing
percentages of populations over age 65 will change, in a positive
direction, societal attitudes toward the elderly. Societies will place
more value on the wisdom, potential economic contribution, and political influence
of its older members. Concomitantly, societies will begin to shift away
from preoccupation with youthfulness.

English will strengthen
its linguistic dominance. Meanwhile, pockets of English dialects will
multiply.

Compared to today, the
average home size in the developed world will have fewer square feet in
fifty years. Family size may have diminished slightly. More significantly,
people will widely rely upon a single, wireless electronic device to
connect with others as well as to access massive amounts of entertainment
and educational materials on the internet. Cameras, watches, CDs, and DVDs
are already rapidly becoming obsolete. Typing will have become anachronistic,
superseded by voice commands and data entry. 3-D printing will further reduce
a need and desire to own lots of stuff. Meanwhile, Homes and electronic devices
will consume less energy and require fewer natural resources to produce,
thereby reducing environmental harms.

US political power
will become further centralized in the executive branch. Reasons for this shift
will include:

States and
municipalities increasing their financial reliance on federal largesse

Presidents from
both parties will use executive orders to fill the power void created by Congressional
stalemate

Special interests
prefer to enact national change rather than fight the 50 plus battles locally
driven change requires

Winning political
campaigns will require ever-vaster sums of money.

Within fifty years, the
US will experience a constitutional crisis. Among the possible outcomes
are a military dictatorship, a civilian dictatorship (perhaps preserving
the appearance but not the substance of popular democracy, with power
residing in a small, self-selected elite), or – most unlikely – a renewal
of genuine democracy. This latter option seems most unlikely because:

Citizens feel
increasingly alienated from the government, no longer believing that
government belongs to each citizen (more broadly, the greater the
population size, the more difficult it is for citizens to feel ownership of
and responsibility for their government)

Diminishing numbers
of citizens feel a responsibility to contribute to the nation by paying
taxes, serving in the military, personally participating in the political
process, etc.

Power, once
concentrated a small elite, is difficult to pry loose.

The US will adopt a
national healthcare system to replace the current hodgepodge approach that
will become financially unsustainable. Meanwhile, life expectancy will continue
to lengthen and overall individual health will improve through more
effective treatment and better prevention.

Recreational use of
illegal drugs will be decriminalized. Forces contributing to this change
will include political leaders currying favor with the populace by seeking
to satisfy consumer demands, the recognition that the war on drugs has
failed abysmally, and both financial and political pressure to reduce the size
and cost of the incarcerated population.

Employment will
shrink, concurrently expanding time for self-development, leisure, and other
pursuits. Technological changes will enable fewer workers to produce more
goods. Automation will further reduce the need for service workers.
Efforts to share employment equitably will achieve some reductions in
working hours but will not be able to avoid the emergence of a de facto
underclass whose members never find employment. Increased demand for
leisure, education, and services will only partially offset the decreased
employment due to advances in technology and automation.

Achieving the goals
of space travel and extra-terrestrial colonization will remain elusive.
High costs, the uncertainty of tangible returns on investment, and
competing priorities will combine to defer realizing aspirations in outer
space.

The world will not:

Be engulfed in a
third world war or experience a nuclear Armageddon

Suffer a worldwide
financial collapse comparable to the national financial collapse the US
experienced in its Great Depression

Be visited by
aliens, much less find itself locked in a life or death struggle with
alien invaders.

The earth and its
peoples will:

Suffer from
increased weather extremes as a result of human caused climate change

Experience sporadic
pandemics, although none will cause death on the magnitude of the Black Death
or the worst Spanish flu pandemic

Find that terrorism
and insurrections are continuing threats, especially as new states emerge
and existing borders shift to better align with ethnic, racial,
religious, and national identities

See new alliances
and federations emerge as states recognize the economic, political, and
security advantages of cooperation over myopic focusing on self-interest

Have harnessed a source
of energy that is largely climate neutral, creating tremendous financial
investment opportunities while shifting economic power away from oil producers
and oil exporting states

Have stabilized its
human population but nevertheless shift toward a diet less reliant on
animal protein, having by then largely overfished the oceans and become more
sympathetic to the concerns of both animal rights advocates and
environmentalists

Unfortunately, I very much doubt that I will be
alive in fifty years to assess the accuracy of my predictions. Nevertheless,
the exercise was an enjoyable catalyst for musings about directions and developments
in global and local trends over the next half century.

What do you predict will happen in the next fifty years?

Collectively, we can improve my prognostications. I
am also willing to bet that if Ethical Musings' readers developed a set of
mutually agreed predictions for what life would look like in fifty years, surprises
would still occur but we would nevertheless have identified many of the most
significant changes.

In what way(s) can these predictions enable people
move toward greater happiness and flourishing? Where are the opportunities for
profit and the dangers to avoid? How can an individual use these predictions to
help the world to become a healthier, safer, more prosperous, and more peaceful
place?